The last decades have witnessed the development of methods for solving struc tural reliability problems, which emerged from the efforts of numerous re searchers all over the world. For the specific and most common problem of determining the probability of failure of a structural system in which the limit state function g( x) = 0 is only implicitly known, the proposed methods can be grouped into two main categories: Methods based on the Taylor expansion of the performance function g(x) about the most likely failure point (the design point), which is determined in the solution process. These...